arabian nights

Dave Monroe monropolitan at yahoo.com
Fri Sep 8 09:01:32 CDT 2006


In CHIMERA John Barth injects his signature wit into
the tales of Scheherezade of the Thousand and One
Nights, Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, and
Bellerophon, who tamed the winged horse Pegasus....

http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?titleNumber=693074

I believe every book of Barth's since Chimera (and
perhaps before) mentions Scheherazade and the
frame-tale from The Thousand and One Nights.

http://www.davidlouisedelman.com/barth/faq.cfm

While working ... as a clerk in the library, he
discovered such wonderful volumes as Sir Richard
Burton's ''Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night,''
Petronius's ''Satyricon'' and Cervantes's ''Don
Quixote'' - books that would inspire him to become a
writer and also shape his literary tastes.

... His next project, a novel tentatively titled ''The
Tidewater Tales,'' will serve as a kind of a
complement to ''Sabbatical.'' Although its central
characters are lovers who sail around Chesapeake Bay,
they will also be - like Mr. Barth's favorite literary
heroine, Scheherazade - storytellers who invent their
lives as they go.

''Surely,'' says Mr. Barth, ''one of the reasons I've
been fascinated by Scheherazade is that stories in
which the characters tell other stories is very much a
part of the way all of us lead our lives. I will meet
my wife in 45 minutes, and I will say 'What have you
been doing?' And she will say, 'How did the interview
go?' and we'll be telling two stories. That's how we
live. We like to imagine that our lives make sense,
and storytelling is one way of ordering events. Of
course, Scheherazade literally has to keep telling
stories or she's kaput. In a less dramatic way, that's
true of every writer in the world - you're only as
good as your next story.''

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/21/specials/barth-simplicity.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The title of Barth's new collection, The Book of Ten
Nights and a Night, showboats a reference to mythic
yarn-spinner Scheherazade for a reason. Like the
classical Thousand and One Nights, these stories are
framed within the time-honored narrative basket that
characterizes the tellers ...

http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2004spring/barth.shtml

... aging writers in bed with Scheherazade (Last
Voyage of Somebody the Sailor) ...

[...]

For four decades he's been writing about characters
who seem to have reached literary and personal
cul-de-sacs.... one woman has helped him in this task
from day one, someone he discovered as an
undergraduate working in the stacks of the Johns
Hopkins Library. Her name is Scheherazade, and he
found her in the centuries-old collection of Persian
tales, The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night.

[...]

The partnership has inspired 17 books--all, as Barth
notes, currently in print--including Giles Goat-Boy,
The Sot-Weed Factor, Chimera, and, most recently,
Coming Soon ...

http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=6216

--- Rcfchess at aol.com wrote:
> 
> A couple of John Barth's books were variations on
> these tales (told by Sheherezade, if memory serves
> me well)...forgot which, though; anyone else on
> the  list help me out here...?

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